Georgia election server reportedly wiped in wake of lawsuit

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There's something going on in Georgia. First, the state rejected help from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to inspect its voting equipment for potential hacker inroads. Strangely, the man responsible for this and a massive private data leak, Georgia's Secretary of State Brian Kemp, was placed on a DHS election cybersecurity panel. Now the Associated Press reports that a computer server important to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials has been wiped clean right after the suit was filed.

According to the report, the data wipe was revealed in an email sent from an assistant state attorney to the case's plaintiffs. The AP made a public records request for more emails and confirmed the wipe. The original lawsuit, by election reform advocates, was filed in order to have Georgia retire the outdated technology the state uses for elections. The server wiped is the same one that was shown to have a massive security issue by a security expert.

The AP says that it's not clear who ordered the data wipe, but the election center it's housed at in Kennesaw, Georgia, answers directly to Kemp. He's running for governor next year and is the main defendant in the suit mentioned above. His office has denied responsibility for the server erasure to the AP.

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